August Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Project Management

Case Studies in Project Management – The Best Project Methodology Provides Value to the Company While Leveraging the Existing Culture.

Taos Professional Services Team

We’re all familiar with the project management dilemma of delivering full functionality, on-time, and on-budget (illustrated in Figure 1). Doing a search on the Internet leads to many research reports that claim that at least 75% of all IT projects fail to meet at least one of these three success criteria.

Among other things, failure to meet these criteria can cause loss of trust, unexpected expense and, with the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley, more serious consequences. Buzzwords like Strategic Project Office (SPO), and Project Management Office (PMO) abound, promising improved ability to meet success criteria. Is there really a silver bullet? What can an IT organization do to improve their chances of project success, and how do you do it without spending a fortune?

Decreasing the Risk of Project Failure

There is no silver bullet, but there are many ways to decrease the risk of project failure. One way is to find an expert to help you. All projects combined, Taos has helped more than a thousand clients run successful IT projects and has provided technical expertise to thousands more. Over the years, we have found what works and what doesn’t work. We take a realistic approach to IT project management - balancing the level of process needed with the client’s organizational structure and project risk areas.

Our Project Management Assessment offering helps IT organizations improve their project practice in a pragmatic way. We base the framework of our assessment on the Project Management Institute (PMI) model, providing the customer with an assessment and recommendations that are based on our real-world IT project experience. The resulting deliverable is a detailed analysis with specific actionable recommendations that help the organization prioritize and focus on the areas that need the most improvement. Based on the amount of time and budget, a second phase might include implementing processes and tools that enable better communication on and insight into the project, or creation of a project management office and standard methodology. In this article, we share real-world examples and look at how Taos has helped clients run successful projects.

Case 1: Bringing a Struggling Project Back On Track and Applying Lessons Learned to Make Future Projects More Successful

In many cases, Taos is brought in to help with a struggling project. To achieve success, the Taos consultant must first analyze the current situation and then remedy any and all existing problems to get the project back on track. This typically leads to development of re-usable tools and processes which will help the customer make future projects more successful.

In our first case, a Taos consultant was brought in to help lead a data center consolidation project. The Taos project manager analyzed the current IT project practices and found areas of inefficiency in portfolio planning, project communication, project quality, and procurement. Working with the client-side project sponsor, IT director, and project team, the Taos consultant put processes and tools in place that built upon the existing methodology. This improved the customer’s ability to deliver projects more efficiently. The key highlights of the issues addressed and results accomplished are:

• The customer lacked a means to make strategic decisions based on resource allocation, project status, and priorities across multiple projects. The Taos consultant analyzed their needs against the tools they already owned in-house and implemented use of a template that provided a single view into the status of the project portfolio. The number and size of the projects they managed did not require a portfolio management system beyond their existing software - the Taos consultant was able to help the client make better use of the tools they already owned. The resulting solution improved project communication as well as the customer’s ability to make quick decisions based on a portfolio view of the projects and their status.
• The quality assurance process was literally undefined. Developers were responsible for unit testing their code, but there was no defined approach for overall system testing. The Taos consultant initiated a QA practice, building a process to create acceptance criteria at the beginning of each project and using that criteria as a basis for system testing. This improved end user satisfaction and provided a re-usable system testing process.
• Another issue that was uncovered was in the area of procurement. The customer had been disappointed in the past when vendors didn’t deliver what the customer expected. There were disconnects between what the vendor thought the deliverable was and what the customer thought it was. The Taos consultant worked with the customer to create a vendor acceptance checklist which was turned into a template. This ensured that the vendor knew, in detail, what was required in order to meet the company’s expectations. Procurement is a major area of risk for projects. Clear and precise communication early in the project can lower that risk and help to avoid missed expectations later in the project lifecycle.

Case 2: Applying the Right Methodology and the Right Experience to Meet an “Impossibly Tight” Deadline

In this case, a Taos customer was in the midst of implementing a brand new infrastructure that included deployment of software and hardware throughout retail stores around the country. When the Taos consultant was brought in, they had only one and one-half weeks to implement the first site. The project team felt that there was no way to make the deadline.

After a brief assessment, the Taos consultant found:

• A lack of technical expertise in specific areas,
• no project documentation, and
• no standard processes.

Having both the technical experience to manage the overall infrastructure rollout and the project experience to implement standard processes along the way, the Taos consultant was able to quickly assume the lead technical role. To meet the tight deadline, Taos provided additional staff to augment the existing team with specific expertise that was missing, tightened up the technical design, and put together a standardized strategy for the store rollouts. The team burned the midnight oil for many nights during that one and one-half weeks and successfully made their deadline. In addition, the client now has a standard methodology for future store rollouts. Other results include:

• Created “factory” approach to system development, using standard processes to create the systems before sending them to the retail locations
• Inventoried hardware and software that had been delivered in order to identify and return unused equipment, saving the client forty-thousand dollars
• Implemented a process to take lessons learned from each new store deployment and roll them back into improving the methodology for the next deployment.

Case 3: Sometimes the Best Project Is No Project

In our third case, another Taos client needed help fast - they were setting up an infrastructure to support communication between the US offices and an office overseas. This project was wrought with technical problems and already past due.

Having a project manager with experience at leading similar projects is a great way to reduce project risk. A Taos consultant who had managed similar projects to success in the past came on board and, after assessing the situation, discovered that there was inadequate planning and that the original design and estimates of cost and time were not accurate. Based upon his experience, the design and plan were updated with realistic timelines and resources, and a new budget and ROI were calculated. Given the updated information, the client was able to make what they considered the best business decision – to cancel the project. On the surface, this might sound like a bad thing, but canceling a project is a perfectly viable way to avoid failure as long as the decision can be made according to hard, measurable facts and objectives. It is important to have an accurate estimate of costs and timelines upfront so that projects can be prioritized and launched according to their true value and ROI.

Case 4: Even Start-Up Companies Can Benefit from Project Management

Unfortunately many times, when a company is in startup mode, standards and processes fall to the wayside. What most of these companies don’t realize is that developing a methodology does not have to be a time consuming endeavor. You can build and evolve your tools and processes as you are building your business; developing processes that are needed and throwing out processes that are of no value.

In our final example, Taos applied this thinking with a client whose company is less than one year old. The customer had nothing more than a list of the IT projects that they wished to complete. Like many IT departments, the personnel that would be working on the projects were also responsible for daily operations. To address this need, Taos assigned one of its most seasoned consultants – one with a broad understanding all IT processes - to help the customer develop a spreadsheet and re-usable template to assess the risk and priority of each of their projects. This re-usable portfolio management process allows the customer to assess project requests and prioritize them in a timely manner and to assign resources more efficiently.

Developing processes and tools as you are actually doing the work is often a good approach because you are developing something you know is useful and that works in your environment. The consultant worked with the client throughout the lifecycle of multiple projects, developing tools and processes along the way. Additional highlights are:

• Took over program management of customer’s IT project portfolio and built methodology for projects, including project plans, status reporting, and bug and issue tracking
• Worked with internal IT team to implement best practices for IT operations
• Provided a baseline skills assessment of the existing team, allowing customer to identify missing skill sets within the organization and to augment the organization with others as needed for each project

Summary – Methodologies Do Not Come in a One-Size-Fits-All Solution

In summary, Taos takes a pragmatic approach towards helping a company improve their project management practice. Project methodologies are not a one-size-fits-all solution: the best methodology is one that provides value and fits well within your organization and culture. It could include development of a project management office or simply improving the existing methodology. Using a combination of PMI’s proven project framework and our IT project management best practices, we can help your organization to assess and improve your current project practice.